Of all the devices of our complex and complete civilization, I think this huge circulating library system one of the most convenient and agreeable;…to have…volumes of excellent literature for one's exclusive use, seems to me a real privilege, and capital return for one's money.

—Frances Ann Kemble, Further Records 1848–1883

WHEN ENGLISHWOMAN ANNA SEWELL died in 1878 of an indeterminate chronic illness, she left a modest note among her papers which read: “I have for six years been confined to the house and to my sofa, and have from time to time, as I was able, been writing what I think will turn out a little book, its special aim being to induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses” (qtd. in Chitty 178). Published in 1877 just months before her death, the “little book” that Sewell wrote proved to be the sixth most popular work printed in the English language1; she entitled it Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse. Sewell’s sentimental tale charts the rise and fall of a beautiful thoroughbred gelding, Black Beauty, from the wholesome pastoral bliss of his early life on a landed estate to his ultimate degradation as a cab horse working the dirty, crowded streets of London. From among the many instances of physical abuse depicted in Black Beauty, Sewell isolates those incurred in the name of “Fashion” as the most pernicious, and her narrative passionately participates in what was at the time a heated public controversy: the application of the curb-bit and the bearing rein, two popular harnessing devices which held the horse’s head tightly erect, compelling the animal into contrived and painful postures for the purpose of appearances alone.

By the time the nineteenth century reached its close, it was already possible to look back at Victorian death culture with nostalgia. With the rise of secularism, the slide toward what Diana Fuss has called the death of death had begun. No longer was it common practice to hold onto the remains of the dead. Rarely would a lock of hair be kept by, to be worn as jewelry, nor did one dwell on the deathbed scene, linger upon the lips of the dying to mark and revere those last words, record the minutiae of slipping away in memorials, diaries, and letters. Rooms of houses were increasingly less likely to hold remains; no one had died in the beds in which the living slept. Walter Benjamin, who wrote often about what was lost in the nineteenth century, sees the turning away from death as going hand in hand with the disappearance of the art of storytelling. Writing in the early 1930s, he called his contemporaries “dry dwellers of eternity” because “today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death” (Illuminations 94). Avoiding the sight of the dying, Benjamin argues, one misses the moment when life becomes narrative, when the meaning of life is completed and illuminated in its ending. He privileges the shared moment of death, when relatives, and even the public, gather around the dying to glean final words of wisdom, to know perhaps, in the end, the whole story. Historian of death Philippe Ariès describes a Christian account of the final ordeal of the death bed, when in the moment of death the salvation or damnation of the dying is determined, thus changing or freezing, for good, the meaning of the whole life. Scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century death culture tend, on the whole, to agree that towards the end of the century, a process that began earlier reached a completion – that the death of the other not only became less of a shared experience among a community, but last things such as final words and remains were increasingly to be pushed to the back of consciousness and hence to the lumber room of meaning and importance.

THE VICTORIAN POETESS has become as important a figure in the late twentieth century as she was in the late nineteenth — perhaps because she seems now, as then, to have lapsed into the obscurity of literary history. In recent years feminist critics have been interested in reclaiming a tradition of nineteenth-century popular poetesses whose verse circulated broadly on both sides of the Atlantic. A spate of new anthologies, annotated editions, and critical collections (as well as texts now available on-line) has reintroduced supposedly lost women poets into the canon of Victorian poetry. Indeed, this recovery is often predicated on a rhetoric of loss, as if only by losing women poets we can rediscover and read them anew. Thus in recent advertisements for such anthologies, we read that Victorian Women Poets (edited by Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds in 1995) “aims to recover the lost map of Victorian women’s poetry,” and British Women Poets of the 19th Century (edited by Margaret Higonnet in 1996) “restores the voices and reputations of these ‘lost’ artists”; likewise, the compendious Nineteenth-Century Women Poets (edited by Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow with Cath Sharrock in 1996) “rediscovers rich and diverse female traditions.”

Charlottesville Fin de siècle XX

O thou that after toil and storm Mayst seem to have reached a purer air, Whose faith has centre everywhere, Nor cares to fix itself to form, or — as the undersigned trusts to find you still —

Dear Reader,

THERE WAS A TIME when the New Criticism taught you to pay attention to literary form as the embodied elaboration of meaning. You knew that authors had a design on you, but you learned to bracket questions of intention and affect so as to concentrate on the design itself, where creative purpose got built out in verbal deed. You dealt, by and large, with the concrete particular, anatomizing complexities for the sake of an analytically earned appreciation of distinct instances of formal unity. While every instance was unique, what you found to say about the unity of this poem or that novel did evince a family resemblance among literary works, and among critical interpretations, that linked them to each other and, presumably, to a family of wholesome universals. Or did it just seem to? If you couldn’t be sure then, and can’t be sure now either, that’s because these larger issues were somehow off in the background and beside the point, which was to practice criticism as a cognition of integral form.

In his Preface to R. M. Ballantyne's most famous novel, J. M. Barrie writes that “[t]o be born is to be wrecked on an island,” and so the British boy “wonder[s] how other flotsam and jetsam have made the best of it in the same circumstances. He wants a guide: in short, The Coral Island” (v). While for Barrie the island is a convenient shorthand for masculine self-actualization, the question pursued here is the relevance of a coral island, or more specifically the coral that forms the island, to the child reader. Published in 1857 and widely recommended for boys in the latter half of the nineteenth century, The Coral Island presents three boys, shipwrecked in the South Pacific, who in the first half of the novel demonstrate their resourcefulness in forming an idyllic community. Their pre-lapsarian paradise is then disrupted, first by Pacific Island cannibals and then by European pirates, the juxtaposition implicitly presenting civility as a quality that must be actively maintained by the European reader, rather than assumed as inherent in ethnicity. The second half of the novel sees the boy narrator, and eventually all the boys, implicated in key Western activities in the South Pacific: piracy, trade, and missionary activity. The latter is important to Ballantyne, a staunch Christian himself, and is focused through the historical phenomenon of Pacific Island “teachers,” that is, converted Pacific Islanders who preceded or accompanied European missionaries in the effort to spread Christianity across the South Pacific. The missionary work highlighted in the novel, as this essay will show, is also integrally connected to the coral featured prominently in its title.

The most striking thing about reviewing the field of Victorian ecocriticism is that there is so little of it. This relative absence is all the more perplexing given that ecocritical work on Romanticism and nineteenth-century American literature is so profuse. Thoreau and Wordsworth remain the most-discussed authors in a field that was in many respects inaugurated by Jonathan Bate's Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991) and Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (1995). Romanticism remains the point of departure for some of the most influential studies in the field, including those like Timothy Morton's Ecology Without Nature (2009) that challenge many of its core precepts. Meanwhile, ecocriticism has expanded to include many other periods and regions, with collections ranging from The Ecocritical Shakespeare (2011) to Postcolonial Ecologies (2011), and unsurprisingly, a strong turn toward the contemporary.

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, scientific taxonomies shaped fictional narratives in highly ambiguous ways. On the one hand, novels–to take the predominant literary genre of the time–invoked the language of science to lend their structures the authority of those models of rationality that seemed to provide the most credible explanations of the observable world. Quite naturally, the project of realism, in its search for verisimilitude, drew upon those explanatory schemas that seemed to offer the closest simulacra of the real. Yet the novels of the period also resisted the authority of the scientific discourses they incorporated. If scientific taxonomies tend toward aggregation–in other words, the fitting of newly discovered forms within classificatory systems of previously known structures–novels, it can be argued, tend toward disaggregation, the resistance of individual characters to those social categories that seek to contain them.

THE POWER THAT COMES FROM being English in the Victorian period is crucially dependent on a categorizing imperative that establishes and structures a series of distinctions such as those between citizen and foreigner, colonizer and colonized, and metropole and colony. These distinctions have epistemological borders that require policing, as do all cross-border interactions that threaten to muddy the imperial landscape with unsanctioned forms of knowledge and affiliation. It is against such a framework of constraints for understanding the regulation of Englishness that the story of the Jamaican-born Mary Seacole and her self-styled role as “Mother” Seacole to British soldiers during the Crimean War appears particularly pregnant with bothersome possibilities. Seeking self-consciously to identify herself with the “mother” country and the imperial metropole, she constantly tests the waters of reception by English society in the mid-nineteenth century. Seacole deploys the image of her racially different body in various noticeably frontier places, mainly Panama and the Crimea, to induce a recognition of herself, if not as English, then as at least functionally so. In so doing, she disrupts the claim to cultural or national identity that is frequently grounded in racial and geographical specificity. She puts strain on the idea of Englishness as foreclosed essence, demonstrating through performance and reiteration its irreducibly performative nature as discourse.

IN AUTUMN OF 1854, Mary Jane Grant Seacole traveled to England from Jamaica and “laid…pertinacious siege” to the official and private residences of Sidney Herbert, Secretary-at-War, hoping to secure a post as hospital nurse in the Crimea. Thwarted in her attempts to see the Secretary, Seacole applied to his wife, Elizabeth Herbert, who informed her “that the full complement of nurses had been secured” (Seacole 78, 79). Seacole made one last effort, meeting this time “with one of Miss Nightingale's companions”; this woman, she reports, “gave me the same reply [as Mrs. Herbert], and I read in her face the fact, that had there been a vacancy, I should not have been chosen to fill it” (79). These interlocutors rejected her, Seacole implies, on account of her colored skin (her mother was Jamaican, her father Scottish), but English prejudice did not keep the “doctress” (as she termed herself) from the front.

GEORGE ELIOT FELT A WELL-KNOWN ambivalence toward “feminine” writing. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) mocks the “composite order of feminine fatuity” that characterizes her contemporaries' fiction (Writings 296). “Woman in France: Madame de Sablé” (1854) maintains that “[w]ith a few remarkable exceptions, our own feminine literature is made up of books which could have been better written by men” (Writings 37). And “The Natural History of German Life” (1856) claims that feminine influence weakens the visual arts: “even those among our painters … who are far above the effeminate feebleness of ‘Keepsake’ style, treat their subjects under the direct influence of traditions and prepossessions rather than of direct observation” (Writings 261). Given such evidence, it is not surprising that Isobel Armstrong hesitates to include Eliot in an important essay on the mid-Victorian poetess tradition, cautioning that “George Eliot … did not willingly associate herself with the ‘feminine’ tradition” (“Music” 370).

In his project for the tale “The Death of The Lion” (1894), Henry James envisaged the mythical, and distinctively modern, fate of the artist as celebrity. Besieged by journalists, lionizers, and autograph-hunters, the celebrated writer is subjected to a voracious desire for knowledge concerning his life, whilst, conversely, the work, upon which his literary fame supposedly rests, is neglected. The work of the author is displaced from its position as the privileged object of literary interpretation by a proliferation of new cultural practices which construe the “life” as a more vital source of meaning. Through such media as advertising, journalism and photography, authors, like the texts which they produce, are marketed as commodities, as products to be circulated and consumed.

Though it has become conventional to refer to the “new cosmopolitanisms” when discussing the resurgence of the term in the 1990s, current debates about cosmopolitanism can be traced back to its usages in the nineteenth century. In both its Victorian and contemporary contexts, cosmopolitanism ranges in connotation from the pejorative to the progressive and in denotation from a phenomenon to an ideal. This constitutive ambivalence helps to explain the controversy that has attended the term, both then and now.

THE 1831 SLAVE NARRATIVE THE HISTORY OF MARY PRINCE is generally thought to be Mary Prince’s autobiography.1 However, there is reason to believe that neither the narrating voice nor Prince’s name are actually hers, and that the agency ascribed to her in this narrative may be more representative of the agendas of external creators of the text than of Prince herself. In The History of Mary Prince, Prince’s name appears in various forms (Mary Prince, Mary Princess of Wales, Mary James, and Molly Wood) each of which reflects the objectives of different editors and owners. Editorial and mediatory figures such as Thomas Pringle, Susanna Moodie (née Strickland), John Wood, Moira Ferguson, and Ziggi Alexander manifest their influence in intrusions into the narrative, appendices, editorial prefaces, and introductions, all of which serve to construct Prince in ideologically and politically loaded ways, and which, in many cases, actually change her name by so doing. These givers of names generally attempt to hide their manipulations, and inadvertently also hide Prince.

The nineteenth century was an era of enormous changes in garden design and garden practice. A wealth of new and exotic plants, located and shipped back by adventurous plant hunters from southern Europe and other, warmer continents, changed the look and character of the garden beyond recognition. The repeal of the glass tax and advances in iron and glass production initiated the craze of the glass house. “Bedding out” consequently became popular, a system in which delicate plants grown under glass could be planted straight outside in warmer months, producing instant colour and ending the frustrating months of bare beds during which gardeners waited for native perennials to bloom. And there were many other important technological advances to ease the lot of the Victorian gardener, such as the patenting of the first lawn mower in 1830 and improvements in tool design. Moreover, with huge advances in printing press technology and distribution, a slew of gardening magazines and gardening manuals sprang up to educate and aid the amateur gardener. The rise of the middle class, housed in suburban terraces and villas with small gardens front and back, produced a ready market for such texts.

A STRIKING NUMBER OF CHARACTERS in Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories who return to England after a sojourn in the colonies have an outlandish aspect. One, a contorted and bilious ex-soldier, owns a pet Indian mongoose. Another has lost a leg to a crocodile in the Ganges and has a poison-toting Andaman Islander in tow. A third keeps a fiendish hound and passes his South American wife off as his sister. A fourth returns from South Africa with a “blanched” face and a furtive manner. Many of these returned colonials are portrayed as menacing, and their presence in England precipitates a crisis, either a crime or a mysterious tragedy. In actual fact, return from the colonies to the metropole was a routine phenomenon, and returned colonials were familiar figures on the metropolitan landscape. Why does Doyle depict the phenomenon of return from Empire as so problematic if it was in fact quite commonplace?

Cecil Rhodes, the “Colossus” of late Victorian empire, proudly proclaimed himself a barbarian. He spoke of his taste for things “big and simple, barbaric, if you like,” and boasted that he conducted himself “on the basis of a barbarian” (Millin 165, 242). His famous scholarships designed to turn out men fit for imperial mastery required success in “manly outdoor sports,” a criterion Rhodes privately called the proof of “brutality” (Stead 39). Yet while Rhodes celebrated qualities he called barbaric or brutal, his adversaries seized upon the same rhetoric to revile him. During the Boer War, for instance, the tactics by which Rhodes and his friends tightened their grip on South Africa were boldly condemned by Henry Campbell-Bannerman as “methods of barbarism.” Similarly, G. K. Chesterton denounced Rhodes as nothing more than a “Sultan” who conquered the “East” only to reinforce the backward “Oriental” values of fatalism and despotism (242–44). This strange consensus, in which Rhodes and his critics could agree about his barbarity, reflects a significant uncertainty about late Victorian imperial ambitions and their relationship to “barbarism.” Clearly, the term was available both to the empire's critics as a metaphor for unprincipled or indiscriminate violence and to imperialists as a justification for their efforts to bring civilization to the Earth's dark places, to spread the gospel, and to enforce the progress of history that the anthropologist E. B. Tylor called “the onward movement from barbarism” (29). But Rhodes's cheerful assertion of his own barbarity represents something altogether different: the apparent paradox of an imperialism that openly embraces the primitive. Nor was Rhodes alone in sounding this particularly troubling version of the barbaric yawp. During the period of the New Imperialism (1871–1914), Victorian popular culture became engrossed as never before in charting vectors of convergence between the British and those they regarded as primitive, and in imagining the ways in which barbarians might make the best imperialists of all. This transvaluation of savagery found its most striking expression in the emergence of a wildly popular genre of fiction: stories of lost worlds.

Upon returning to England in December 1856 after sixteen years in the interior of southern Africa, David Livingstone, the celebrated missionary and explorer, received an enthusiastic welcome. Already a household name because of his well-publicized discoveries and travels, Livingstone now found himself a hero of national stature. The Royal Geographical Society and the London Missionary Society organized large receptions in his honor; he received the freedoms of several cities, including London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow; Oxford University awarded him an honorary D.C.L. (Doctor of Civil Law); and Queen Victoria invited him to a private audience (Schapera ix-x). Likewise, the encyclopedic narrative of his adventures, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), garnered numerous favorable reviews, sold some 70,000 copies, and ultimately made the explorer a rich man. Livingstone's narrative, wrote one early reviewer, opened up “a mystic and inscrutable continent,” while the story of Livingstone's famous four-year transcontinental journey – the first such documented journey in history – inspired admiration for being “performed without the help of civilized associate, trusting only to the resources of his own gallant heart and to the protection of the missionary's God” (“Dr. Livingstone's African Researches” 107). In promoting the Zambesi River as a natural highway into the interior of Africa and in advocating for the three C's – Christianity, commerce, and civilization – as a means to ending the slave-trade and opening the continent's natural riches to the outside world, Missionary Travels also struck a resounding chord with the public. Reviewers welcomed Livingstone's pronouncements, while describing the missionary as “an instrument, divinely appointed by Providence for the amelioration of the human race and the furtherance of God's glory” (“Livingstone's Missionary Travels” 74).

Although “cosmopolitanism” is, in many respects, the recognized creation of the eighteenth century, in recent years the idea has made a mark on the theory and practice of Victorian studies. In this essay I offer some reflections on this development while suggesting one future path for a Victorianist cosmopolitan practice. My goal is to limn a theory of what I call “the Victorian geopolitical aesthetic” which, in grasping the globalizing dynamics of the nineteenth century, illuminates the literature and culture of that era. By way of doing so, I will explore cosmopolitan literary study as it has so far developed, describing its focus on ethics. I will also try to update the legacy of historical materialism (including the work of Georg Lukács, Raymond Williams, and Fredric Jameson) by integrating it with newer transnational perspectives such as cosmopolitanism and the new Atlantic studies. My aim is to suggest ways of reading Victorian literature – specifically realist fiction but potentially other genres as well – which recognize the power of literature to engage “actually existing cosmopolitanisms” then and now.

Three ghostly white plants float suspended atop the Prussian-blue background of a 27 x 21 cm print (fig. 1). Their leafy fronds are so exquisitely fine that in some places the blue bleeds through their tissues to expose delicate quiltings of veins and willowy inflorescences. Opaque white patches mottle each of the plants to signal where multiple layers of plant flesh overlap. The interplay of shapes, color, and textures in the image captures an atmospheric effect of alien beauty, nearly incomprehensible. That is, until the small label at the bottom of the print in meticulous penmanship informs us that we are looking at Delessaria sanguinea, a type of red algae commonly known as “Sea Beech.” This is one in the thousand-plus body of images that comprises Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. Dedicated to documenting England's native seaweed, ferns, and flowering plants, Atkins's photographic botanical project ranged about a decade (October 1843–53) and resulted in multiple editions she would give to friends and cultural institutions. While she primarily helmed the project herself, she occasionally included her father, zoologist and photography enthusiast John Children. For the last couple albums, she enlisted as a co-creator her “like a sister” Anne Dixon, who collected, arranged, and developed the images alongside Atkins.